Page 48 of Virago

The shower got him right enough to give Doofus the attention he deserved. Freshly dressed and feeling human again, he let the dog out to do his business while he freshened Doof’s water and put down his breakfast—he got the good canned stuff in the morning.

Zaxx washed his morning meds and a dose of aspirin down with some orange juice, then took his glass out and sat on the front steps to toss around one of the many tennis balls that littered their strip of a yard and filled a five-gallon paint bucket. Doofus would fetch a ball until his legs wore clean off his body, bushy tail wagging the whole time.

But it was time to go to work. “That’s it, my dude. Let’s go in.” He tipped the paint bucket of balls toward the dog, and Doofus reluctantly dropped this morning’s slobbery edition in with the others. He sulked his way back into the trailer but perked up at once when he smelled his breakfast. Doofus was a simple man.

~oOo~

Zaxx had mounted his bike and was about to start it when his burner buzzed. Though the Horde had been like ninety-five percent legit for around two decades, they straddled the line often enough that Badger insisted the patches all keep burners, and Dom wiped them and switched them around from time to time, on the off chance that they might end up in deeper, darker waters than they’d realized.

All club business, dark or light, happened on the burners, so Zaxx didn’t have any particular idea why his might be ringing now. He didn’t know who had the number that came up, either.

“Yeah, you got Zaxx,” he answered.

It was Dom. “Hey. You at the job site yet?”

“Nope. Gettin’ a slow start this morning. But I’m on my bike, about to start it up. What’s up?”

“Tommy knows this cop, the one that fucked with Zelda. Turns out he dated the guy’s ex for a while. He’s got some insight. You know the Taco Bell near the campus?”

A faint zing of adrenaline hit the back of Zaxx’s head. “Yeah, I know it.”

“Meet us there at ...” Zaxx could sense Dom doing the math. On a bike, the outer eastern boundary of the Springfield area, where the job site was located, was half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes, from Signal Bend, but Missouri State was in the middle of the actual city. On a Monday morning, that was at least an hour. Springfield was a smallish city, with less than 200,000 residents, but it was a city, and it had a rush hour. Even bikes got snarled in that kind of traffic.

“Seven-thirty,” Dom finally figured. “Meet us there at seven-thirty.”

“Okay. Why?”

Dom chuckled. “Tommy’s got an idea for handling the guy. I figure you want in.”

“Damn right I do.” In fact, he wanted to lead whatever they did, but he’d wait to have that conversation face to face.

“Okay,” Dom said. “Dub already knows you won’t be on site ‘til later. So let’s fuck up an asshole, yeah?” He laughed with obvious glee.

Zaxx grinned. Dom had been around for the outlaw days. It sounded like he was glad for a chance to be somebody’s bad guy again.

Zaxx had never cared to be a bad guy. He didn’t chafe at the club’s subdued pace. He wouldn’t be wearing the Flaming Mane if the Horde were still trafficking meth through the heartland or pissing off drug lords, or any of the other insanity they’d been neck-deep in back in the day.

But yeah, he wouldn’t mind at all the chance to be Sgt. Bill Danvers’ bad guy.

He started up his LiveWire and headed for Springfield.

~oOo~

Tommy Nickels, the club Sergeant at Arms, and Dom were waiting when Zaxx pulled onto the Taco Bell parking lot. They sat astride their bikes and watched as he pulled up to them and stopped.

The SAA made a face at Zaxx’s bike and shook his head. “It’s just not right for a Harley to be so fuckin’ quiet.”

Tommy was a big, bald, heavily inked Navy vet who had the body of a guy who’d been swole as fuck as a younger man—and Zaxx had seen the photos on the big bulletin board in the Hall that proved it. Now, somewhere in his fifties, what he had was a barrel chest, a thick neck, and a bad attitude. He could still fuck an asshole up, but he wouldn’t be oiling up and posing for any beefcake calendars these days.

(He’d actually done that once, apparently to help out a girl he was seeing back then, who’d worked for an animal shelter. He was Mr. September 2021, with a fluffy white kitten on his shoulder. That was on the bulletin board, too, with a sparkly gold paper frame and jeweled heart stickers some prankster—probably Len—had put around it.)

Tommy rode a massively modded late-model Heritage that sounded like a howling hellbeast, and he had at least a half dozen other bikes plus four or five cars and trucks. He’d been complaining loudly and bitterly since well before the law banning new combustion engines had gone into effect, and he’d started buying up gas-powered vehicles like they were gold ingots or something. He was one of the last holdouts in the club who hadn’t even bought an electric as a side ride—and he swore he would hang up his kutte before he ever would.

Zaxx, on the other hand, thought the electrics were pretty sweet. He still had his Fat Boy, of course, but that was under cover at the back of his carport. The LiveWire was fast as fuck, the range was decent, and while it didn’t sound like a classic Harley, models like Zaxx’s had some throat. Okay, the sound was artificial, added for safety (a silent motorcycle was a guaranteed gory death), but the literally trademarked Harley roar was partially artificial anyway. And Tommy’s mods added effects on top of that.

Besides, humans were burning the planet to a cinder right beneath their feet. If outlawing new combustion engines could slow that down even a little, Zaxx was for it.

He’d stopped trying to have that conversation with Tommy long ago. The dude was the definition of immovable.

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